Nikon Coolpix S500 Digital Camera Review
By Emily Raymond
Reviewed.com Editorial Staff
Published on July 26, 2007
The 7.1-megapixel Nikon Coolpix S500 has a simple design and basic features with a few additional items of interest. Other S-series cameras have wavy designs, musical slide shows, and internal lenses. The S500, however, opts for a flat stainless steel body and an extending 3x optical zoom lens. It retails for $299.
The S500’s 3x lens is optically stabilized to reduce the amount of blur in pictures and keep video from shaking along with your hands. This is an upgrade from the Nikon S200, which had a sub-par digital image stabilization system. Video can be recorded in three resolutions with the best being the standard 640 x 480 pixels at 30 frames per second (fps). The resolution looks good on televisions, but moving subjects still look a little jerky. The optical zoom is disabled while recording video, but the camera allows you to zoom 2x digitally. This degrades the image quality, though, so it should be used sparingly.
There isn’t a true Auto mode, but there is a Program mode and 17 Scene modes, 15 of which are placed in a “SCN” position on the virtual mode dial. There isn’t a physical mode dial on the camera body, but there is a mode button that makes a graphic dial appear on the LCD screen and a physical rotary dial to control it. The rotary dial doubles as a multi-selector, eases menu navigation, and can flip through images in the Playback mode at a speedy 10 fps.
With 7.1 megapixels, the Nikon Coolpix S500 can print up to 11x17-inch pictures. The digital camera has the ability to create and save print orders in the Playback menu. You can select 0-9 prints to be made from each image and the order is saved until the camera is connected to a PictBridge compatible printer with the included USB cable.
Atop the basics, Nikon has some decent components. The S500 has a fairly powerful flash that reaches more than 24 feet but almost always leaves the background completely black. It has a 2.5-inch LCD screen that has excellent resolution with 230,000 pixels and a very smooth live view that makes it look like a window except for the limited viewing angle; you have to look almost straight at the LCD to see it.
Nikon threw in an interesting interval timer, perfect for shooting slow moving subjects, along with the company's host of technology that includes red-eye fix, D-lighting compensation to automatically fix the exposure, and face priority autofocus. A few more perks include a Voice Recording mode and 26 MB of internal memory that is useful when you forget your SD or MMC memory card. An alternative to this media is the Sony W100, which has 64 MB of internal memory and a slot for Memory Stick Duo cards.
The Coolpix S500 retails for $299 and was released alongside the S200, which has a lot of similarities but is meant to be the more budget-friendly model with its $249 price tag. The S200 also has 7.1 megapixels and a 3x optical zoom lens, but its flash isn’t as powerful and lens isn’t as wide. Its ISO range tops off at 1000 rather than the S500’s top setting of 2000. It also doesn’t have optical image stabilization or decent resolution on its LCD screen. In the end, the S500 is worth the extra $50.For a more in-depth review, visit the Nikon Coolpix S500 Review at our partner DigitalCameraInfo.com
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